Ingenuity and altruism go hand in glove for Michael O’Neill.
His Newark-based company, O’Neill Innovations, has invented a new type of work glove designed to make life easier for everyone from gardeners to bricklayers.
The company’s Maxfit gloves are created from a blend of polymers that make them ultra flexible, breathable and durable, O’Neill said, designed to fit a person’s hand like a glove should.
The gloves are the first innovation from O’Neill’s fledgling company, which he founded a year ago with the mission of creating new products that have an obvious benefit.
Many products hit store shelves with a flashy “new and improved” sticker on their packages, but no noticeable benefit for consumers, said O’Neill, 51, of
“We want the benefit to be a no-brainer,” he said. “You can see that the product works because it works.”
And typical work gloves do not work, he said.
O’Neill learned firsthand about typical work gloves when he walked into a convenience store and tried on a few pairs marketed for gardening. They were clumsy and bulky. One could only imagine how fumbling with a trowel while wearing a pair of those stifling work gloves, barely protecting fingers from angry thorns would be – hardly a pleasant situation, O’Neill said.
But human comfort, especially for day-to-day activities, is the driving force behind O’Neill Innovations. So O’Neill and his colleagues began thinking about gloves.
Fingertips have 2,500 sensors, which make hands the second most sensitive part of the human body. Gloves are at their most uncomfortable when they restrict a hand’s natural abilities to sense, grab and heal.
To give birth to his glove-shaped vision, O’Neill used the extensive knowledge of chemistry he gathered during a 27-year career at DuPont to select polymers that would create the perfect gloves. Even so, much of the process was trial and error, he said, especially when the chemicals counteracted one another and he was forced to return to the drawing board.
After seven months of development, O’Neill put his gloves to the toughest tests he could think of: asking a photographer, guitar player and brail reader to try them on.
They met with approval from that eclectic mix of testers, but the biggest challenge was still on the horizon: marketing it, O’Neill said.
The product is a new category of work glove, and people need to be educated about it before they will become customers, he said. But people are quick learners, and today, O’Neill Innovations is facing an almost overwhelming number of orders.
Maxfit gloves may have become an instant success, he said, but the people at O’Neill Innovations are not resting on their laurels. The company is pioneering new products involving shape memory and researching technologies to make body armor lighter, he said, staying true to their goal of making people more comfortable.
“If I can do things to help people in a very constructive way, I get satisfaction out of that,” he said.
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